I started as a production secretary working on a lot of political documentaries and experimental shorts funded by the Arts Council and Channel 4. Then I moved to the BFI, developing slates of scripts and helping on the production of films such as Love Is the Devil and Under the Skin. Now I'm freelance.

It's critical to be flexible, particularly when you're not bankrolled by a big studio and are forced to scrabble around for development money just to keep going. All my features have been pieced together with some combination of cultural funding.

I think the industry is a good deal better than it was five or six years ago. People have learned a great deal about how to make, finance and distribute films. There's a wealth of expertise now that simply didn't exist before. I think the lottery and the creation of the Film Council has done a great deal to provide us with a film culture. It's broken open that closed society of film-making and provided a lot more people with the opportunity to make movies. Film Council funding comes down to the individual tastes of the people who control the purse-strings. It's great if those people are visionaries with good taste. If they're not, it can be a problem.

We still don't make enough films that are successful outside the established genres. What we need is a Spike Lee or a Jim Jarmusch - directors who make hip, fashionable movies that are distinctive and personal as well as popular. The trouble is that those new voices are not breaking through in the numbers we need. Our funding bodies still privilege a certain kind of formally experimental film-maker.

The result is that the industry still feels very polarised. On the one side you have the nakedly commercial style of film-making, the Hollywood calling card. And on the other you have what is seen as the cultural film, which has always been ghettoised. There's a big gap in the middle that has to be filled. We have to be much more confident in telling our own individual British stories, and in not feeling limited in what we feel we can say. It will happen, but it takes time.

The director

Asif Kapadia Writer-director, The Warrior

My parents are from India, but I was brought up in Hackney. It definitely wasn't a film background. If I went to the cinema as a kid, it would be to see Eddie Murphy, or a Police Academy movie. I don't remember ever going to see a British film. I only began getting interested in cinema when I was about 17, watching Scorsese films and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. That was a huge inspiration. When you're from a background like mine, it's incredible to see a film made about a life and a neighbourhood that you can relate to.

I was studying graphic design when I helped out on a student's short film, and one thing led to another. I liked that weird extended family that you have when you're making movies. I worked as a sound recordist, a first assistant director and an electrician. I worked on a late-night TV show for Carlton and made loads of commercials: ads for Kit-Kat, Canon cameras, Hell lager. I've done a bit of everything.

When I studied film at the Royal College of Art, I made three short films of my own. The last one, Sheep Thief, won an award at Cannes. It was set in the Indian desert, and became a sort of forerunner to my first feature, The Warrior. It helps to have something to show to financiers, so that they have an idea of what you're going to do.

The Warrior is a Hindi western set in India. But it's still British. It's the best kind of British film. My director of photography is half German and half Nigerian, the editor is Swedish, the composer is Italian and the producer is Irish. But we're all from London, and our common language is the movies.

I think the future is bright for British film. I look at the younger generation of directors - people like Lynne Ramsay and Jamie Thraves - and they're proper auteurs. They're not just looking for a quick stepping stone to Hollywood. It's getting the audience that's the problem. Culturally, we're just not very interested in film, maybe because TV is seen to be so strong. In France and Germany you see people queueing up in the snow to pay a tenner to see a programme of short films. I can't imagine that happening here. We are not a nation of cinephiles.

The actor

Kate Ashfield Actor, Late Night Shopping, The Low Down, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, The War Zone

I feel quite positive about British film because there are some exciting people who are being given a chance at the moment. Jack Lothian, who wrote Late Night Shopping, is only 26 and that was his first script, and Saul Metzstein, who directed it, worked his way up from being a runner on Shallow Grave. The real problem is getting these films shown.

FilmFour finances a lot of the lower-budget independent films, but what these films get such small releases here compared to most American films. Ten-screen cinemas were meant to allow for smaller films, but what's actually happened is that you get the same big movie being shown on two screens. Occasionally films like Lock, Stock and The Full Monty break through, but you don't want every film to be like that.

Films can be made for less money now - especially with digital filming, which I don't much like because you never know where the camera is. But if you're prepared to work for less, there are projects out there. You get a weekly wage, typically. It's an exciting place to work.

I'd definitely prefer to stay working in the British film industry. I think the standard is much better here than in America, and there's a kind of reality you get in British movies that you don't even get in television. You act in order to get to the soul of someone, and these smaller British films are at least trying to achieve that.

It's certainly harder to make a living in the film world than the television world. The Low Down was so small - we shot it in a flat in south London - and it was fun for that reason. Everyone's in it as a team effort; everyone has to muck in, as it were, and I think that's healthy.

I was in the original production of Shopping and Fucking, and enjoyed it so much that I decided to try to get it made into a film. Now I'm realising how hard it is. Mark Ravenhill doesn't want to write it, so we need to get someone else, and it's so difficult to get the money. It feels like banging your head against a wall, and yet we're starting with so much here. God knows how a first-time director with an unseen script does it.

The writer

Stel Pavlou Writer, The 51st State

I came up with the idea for the film in my final year at Liverpool University and started writing a year later. There are stories about me applying for 600 jobs in the media, which are absolutely true: I have 600 rejection letters to prove it. Out of frustration, I wrote a script in four weeks flat because I had nothing else to do. A friend heard that if you clearly marked your screenplay as an independent feature, Tim Roth would read it, so I marked it Independent Feature Films Inc and sent it to him in LA. Two weeks later I got a call from him asking me what I'd done. Well, nothing. So he said that he would direct.

Then he pulled out. We asked if we could use his name anyway - we told him that we couldn't give a fuck if he directed it or not, but his name would be useful. So we made a fictitious company stamp, carved out of a potato, and went to Cannes. That led to a deal with Focus Films in London, and through Tim Roth, we got Samuel L Jackson. After four years and no social life, three directors and 19 script rewrites, the film got made.

I approached every finance house, every British producer, and they all turned me down flat. We applied for Lottery money three times. Ewan McGregor recently said that you can't get distribution for British films, but you also still have a significant old boys' network who don't run the industry as a business. A lot of Lottery grants are used to turn out shite, mainly because the money is pissed away at champagne parties.If they see a trend they'll milk it, but the lifeblood of movies is good storytelling and good characters.

We rivalled Hollywood for output in the 1950s and 1960s. There's no reason why we can't do it again, but we need a couple of overbearing personalities to kick us out of the Stone Age.

We need a studio system. When the Scott brothers [Ridley and Tony] bought up Shepperton, it looked like it might happen, but it didn't. We need two major studios to start churning them out again. The main problem is too much fannying about in private London clubs.

There are a ton of stories outside London waiting to be told, and I don't mean drab 1970s social realism; we've done that.